An International Comparison of Legislative Ethics

The practice of representation permeates our society and is essential to its routine functioning. This representation is based on a transfer of authority, a (limited) surrender of autonomy, and a set of shared expectations about the rights of the represented and the duties of the representative. Ethics has become a leading item on state legislative agendas, although most legislators wish the furor would die down and the subject of ethics would simply go away. For them ethics puts the legislature squarely between the proverbial rock and hard place. In political parlance, it is a no-win situation.1 People are often suspicious of politics-skeptical about its claims and dubious about its practitioners. Why should this be so? We can find a reason if we think about the character of the political realm itself and the intrinsic nature of political practice. The familiar claim that power corrupts is hard to establish as a necessary truth but may be easier to maintain as a general tendency. In politics there may be a suspicion not simply that corrupt men are attracted to it but that good intentions or high motives tend to be undermined. To put the point another way, one resonant of Machiavelli, it may be that political agents, if they are to do what is required of them and what we expect of them, cannot afford high moral motives or dispositions.2 The idea that politics is a realm which we cannot properly countenance from a moral point of view is an unacceptable one since highly undesirable consequences are likely to follow up.